HP Envy x360 15.6 (2023) Review (2024)

We've said more than once that 15.6- and 16-inch screens are too big for convertible laptops, and the HP Envy x360 15.6 (starts at $799.99; $1,199.99 as tested) doesn't convince us otherwise. At 4.43 pounds, it's too heavy and unwieldy for use in tablet mode. However, if you need a large laptop that can fold into easel or kiosk modes for presentations or movie watching, the Envy is intriguing. That is, if only for what HP (our Readers' Choice award holder for 2-in-1 laptops) calls the world's first laptop screen certified for IMAX Enhanced. We call it one of the few brilliant OLED displays we've seen that stops at humble full HD (1,920-by-1,080-pixel) resolution.

Design and Configuration: Worth Marveling At?

Actually, a quick search turns up only one other 1080p OLED laptop, the Samsung Galaxy Book Pro 13 from 2021, which is also the last time we reviewed the 2021 HP Envy x360 15.6 2-in-1.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

This year's model supports the IMAX Enhanced aspect ratio of 1.9:1, which shows a bit more of the top and bottom of a cinematic image and is mostly available for Marvel movies on Disney+. I can't imagine who would choose a 1080p rather than a 4K or other high-res laptop display for watching IMAX content, but the feature is available if you want it.

Indeed, the Envy x360 15.6 includes loads of features as well as your choice of AMD or Intel silicon. The most affordable configuration is a $799.99 Ryzen 5 model at Best Buy with a dim 250-nit IPS display. Intel versions can be ordered with a Core i5 or Core i7 processor, the latter with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 GPU. All AMD models rely on Radeon integrated graphics.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

Our $1,199.99 test unit—cut to $799.99 by one of HP's ever-changing discounts at this writing—combines an eight-core Ryzen 7 7730U chip with the OLED touch screen, the max 16GB of memory, and a 1TB NVMe solid-state drive. Some models come with an active stylus pen that sticks magnetically to the side of the laptop, but ours didn't.

Clad in Nightfall Black aluminum (Natural Silver is an alternative), the Envy measures 0.72 by 14.1 by 9 inches—virtually identical to another 15.6-inch convertible, the Asus Zenbook Pro 15 Flip OLED, though the Asus is a tad lighter at 3.97 pounds. The slightly larger-screened Dell Inspiron 16 2-in-1 is 0.75 by 14.1 by 9.9 inches and matches the HP's weight at 4.4 pounds.

Thin-enough bezels surround the display, for which HP claims an 88.3% screen-to-body ratio, while the webcam atop the display lid has a sliding privacy shutter. The camera also has IR face recognition for Windows Hello logins, but a fingerprint reader is absent. You'll feel a little flex or wobble if you grasp the screen corners or tap the screen in laptop mode, and more if you press the keyboard deck, but the Envy x360 feels fairly sleek and sturdy overall.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

The laptop's left side holds a 10Gbps USB Type-A port, an audio jack, and an SD card slot. On the right is another USB-A port, two 10Gbps USB-C ports (either suitable for the AC adapter), and an HDMI connection. (With USB-C DisplayPort adapters, HP says the Envy can drive three 4K displays.) Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3 are standard, as is Windows 11 Home.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

Using the HP Envy x360 15.6: One Sophisticated Camera

If Lenovo arguably sets the pace in laptop keyboards, HP led the way in webcams this year. The Envy has a 5-megapixel camera that captures images and videos at up to 2,560-by-1,440 (16:9 aspect ratio), 2,592-by-1,944 (4:3 ratio), or 2,592-by-1,728 (3:2 ratio) resolution. My face looked a bit soft-focus in the recorded image, but its backgrounds were sharp, and everything was well-lit and colorful with no noise or static. Options in Windows 11's battery settings can hibernate the PC if you leave your desk and wake the system when you return.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

The HP Presence module in the provided myHP software provides wide or tight automatic framing and image enhancement with backlight and low-light adjustment. The tool can also blur or replace your background with an image of your choice and capture PDFs as well as image and video files. Additionally, the software can follow you as you move between the webcam's and a second USB camera's field of view as well as apply keystone correction to crooked whiteboards or documents.

Another HP trademark, arranging the keyboard's cursor arrow keys in an awkward row instead of the proper inverted T using hard-to-hit, half-size up and down arrows, unfortunately persists. On the positive side, the Envy x360 has dedicated Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down keys instead of making you press the Fn and arrow keys at once. The brightly backlit keyboard has a handsome font and a shallow-but-snappy typing feel. Meanwhile, the laptop's midsize, buttonless touchpad glides and taps smoothly but has a slightly stiff, shallow click.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

The Bang & Olufsen speakers flanking the keyboard aren't exceptionally loud but pump out decent sound that's a touch hollow but with clear highs and midtones, and even a bit of bass. Their audio isn't harsh or tinny even at top volume, and you can hear overlapping tracks. The myHP tool includes an equalizer, and HP preloads a 14-day trial of DTS surround-sound utilities.

Except for sticking to old-school full HD instead of 2.8K or 4K resolution, the Envy's OLED touch screen is faultless, with rich, deeply saturated colors, inky blacks, and pristine white backgrounds. Its contrast is awesome, with ample brightness. Viewing angles on the display are wide without excessive room reflections, and fine details are sharp, with no pixelation around the edges of letters. The deep, vivid screen is a pleasure to look at for word processing and web browsing, let alone videos and movies.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

Besides the above-mentioned utilities, HP provides a Command Center app that governs network optimization and performance/cooling modes, a Duet app for using your smartphone as a second display, a QuickDrop tool for swapping files with it—along with assorted promotions for Dropbox, ExpressVPN, and LastPass. The Envy carries a one-year warranty.

Testing the HP Envy x360 15.6: Plus-Size Convertibles Punch It Out

In addition to the 15.6-inch Asus Zenbook Pro 15 Flip OLED, we compared the Envy x360 15.6's performance with that of three 16-inch 2-in-1 laptops: the Samsung Galaxy Book3 Pro 360, the Dell Inspiron 16 2-in-1 (7635), and the Lenovo Yoga 7i 16 Gen 8. Their configurations as tested appear below.

Productivity Tests

We run the same general productivity benchmarks across both mobile and desktop systems. Our first test is UL's PCMark 10, which simulates a variety of real-world productivity and office workflows to measure overall system performance and also includes a storage subtest for the primary drive.

Our other three benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon's Cinebench R23 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Geekbench 5.4 Pro from Primate Labs simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better).

Finally, we run PugetBench for Photoshop by workstation maker Puget Systems, which uses the Creative Cloud version 22 of Adobe's famous image editor to rate a PC's performance for content creation and multimedia applications. It's an automated extension that executes a variety of general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks ranging from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.

The Envy led the way in PCMark 10, though all five convertibles easily cleared the 4,000 points that indicate excellent productivity for everyday apps like Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace. Otherwise, the Envy landed in the middle of the group in our CPU benchmarks, and it posted a respectable score in Photoshop. While the Yoga 7i 16 took the win in Photoshop, we'd pick the HP for image editing, given its superior screen.

Graphics Tests

We test the graphics inside all laptops and desktops with two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark: Night Raid (more modest, suitable for laptops with integrated graphics), and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs).

To further measure GPUs, we also run two tests from the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which stresses both low-level routines like texturing and high-level, game-like image rendering. The 1440p Aztec Ruins and 1080p Car Chase tests, rendered offscreen to accommodate different display resolutions, exercise graphics and compute shaders using the OpenGL programming interface and hardware tessellation respectively. The more frames per second (fps), the better.

The HP finished near the back of a frankly sluggish pack; the integrated graphics processors in these laptops are fine for solitaire or video streaming but far from able to play the latest games. They're suited for mid-level photo or video editing, not for workstation-class design or CGI rendering.While the Envy wasn't blown away in these tests, don't come to a laptop such as this for 3D rendering—look elsewhere.

Battery and Display Tests

We test each laptop's battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100%. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off.

To gauge display performance, we also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and software to measure a laptop screen's color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).

It was the second shortest time in our quintet, but the Envy's 13 hours and 39 minutes is plenty of battery life for a desktop replacement system. If you have to get through a full day of work or school without an AC outlet, it should be no problem. Of course, the Envy's OLED screen showed glorious color fidelity and brightness—a bit under its advertised 400 nits, but OLED's sky-high contrast makes that a nonissue.

Verdict: Low-Res But Likable

We've mentioned our lack of enthusiasm for large, heavy 2-in-1 laptops in general but, besides that, about our only gripe or hesitation in recommending the HP Envy x360 15.6 is that competitors provide higher-resolution displays. It's not a bargain at its $1,199.99 list price, either, but tempting at its current $799.99 discount, however long that holds. The Envy falls short of Editors' Choice award honors, but if you frequently attend video calls and want a full-size laptop with a screen that makes your presentations look their best—or are just curious about IMAX Enhanced—you could do a lot worse. In this price range, we still recommend the albeit smaller Lenovo Yoga 7i 14 Gen 7 as our midrange 2-in-1 of choice.